Page 45 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

“Your father brought you here?” Liv asked.

Mandy could hear skepticism in her sister’s voice. Maybe it was just the impossibility of imagining their own dad willingly tromping into the great outdoors.

“He was actually the inspiration for CareFree,” Devon said. “Dad got me excited about plants as a kid. He’d always be bending down to snap a picture of a wildflower popping out of the sidewalk or an unusual weed in his tomatoes. Mom joked he was great at taking family photos of our feet.”

Mandy looked at Charlie to see his reaction to the family memory. But the man was gazing out at the slick volcanic rock.

“When I was getting my PhD,” Devon continued, “my father joined me on some of my scouting trips. Twelve years ago, we came here, not to raft the canyon, but to walk it, rim to rim.”

“Not a lot of plants in a desert,” Mandy said.

“More than you’d imagine. This canyon crosses five out of the seven biomes you’d see if you walked the US from top to tail. And what grows here, it’s magic. The Native people know it. Botanists know it. There’s a plant here that showed me what could be possible for CareFree.”

“What plant?” Liv asked.

“Datura,” Devon said. “Native people call it sacred thorn-apple.”

“Why is it sacred?”

“Datura is central to a lot of traditional healing ceremonies in the Southwest. Medicine people brew a version of it as a hallucinogenic. It’s a powerful vision expander.”

“Datura’s all over here,” Katy piped up from the back of the raft. “The side canyons are full of it. It’s toxic if you don’t know how to handle it, but Indigenous people in the Grand Canyon use it for rituals. Kinda spooky, though.”

“Spooky?”

Katy nodded. “Datura’s a moonflower. It blooms at night, gets pollinated by bats. Witchy. I have an herbalist friend who got deep into communing with it. Smoking the flowers, sucking on the seeds, making tinctures from the root. She said Lady Datura entered her like a murderous goddess of hell.”

Charlie coughed. “That’s not the way we see it.”

“My brother’s right,” Devon clarified. “We aren’t focused on the spiritual side of datura. But its unique properties inspired our product development.”

“Datura isn’t a product,” Katy said. “It’s a supernatural being. I drank it once, brewed into a tea. I swear I flew that night.”

“Just once? You didn’t want to fly again?” Mandy asked.

“I did it one more time,” Katy said. “The second trip freaked me out. The plant spoke to me in this deep voice, trapped me in a tunnel of darkness. I think I took a single breath in twelve hours.”

Devon nodded. “There are accounts tracing back to the 1600s of people in North America ingesting datura—the seeds, in particular—and experiencing a range of hallucinatory effects. All the records suggest the experience is transcendent, but highly variable. At Oxford, I started correlating different effects that could be traced to dosage, preparation, and the precise strain of the plant. One of the more reliable effects across different strains is a kind of temporary amnesia. A letting go of worry. When you get the right dose, it feels—”

“Carefree,” Mandy said.

Devon’s mouth twitched. “I didn’t love that name at first. But yes. We developed a distillation process to safely isolate that feeling. The sense I had in those earliest tests, it was more than carefree. It was like someone opened new space in my heart.”

Her words vibrated through the air, mirroring the easy ripples of the water. Conversation was both quieter and amplified in the canyon, echoing off the high walls and then falling away, slipping under the purr of the river.

“Anyway.” Devon shrugged. “I knew there was something in it that could help people.”

“So now you’re in the drug business?” Liv asked.

“Not at all,” Charlie interjected. “We’re in the wellness business. Traditional medicine is important, but it’s also unpleasant. People see it as being about sickness. You take the drug, you get better, but the road to recovery is studded with chalky pills and scary injections. What we offer is an alternative. An experience of self-care. Of pleasure. It’s about building the relationship with your body you want. And this new product? The potential for CareFree is nothing less than personal freedom.”

Mandy thought of the little jar PK had offered her that morning, its creamy promise. She couldn’t wait to try it later that night.

Liv seemed unconvinced. “You think there are millions of people who want to forget their lives?”

“Not forget. Just take a break. Tap into that openness Devon was talking about. Do you know how rare that feeling is? A few people are lucky enough to do this”—Charlie scooped a handful of river water and let it pour down his arm—“but most don’t have the time or money to step outside their lives. They’re under constant pressure. Prescriptions for anxiety medications are through the roof. People feel broken, like they need to be fixed. But we believe it’s the world that’s broken, and you deserve to give yourself a break every once in a while.”

“But if datura makes people feel like witches from hell, that hardly sounds like—”